Unlocking the descriptive information or metadata about digital content, articles, books and research is the key to making it more useful, according to the JISC-funded resource discovery taskforce as it embarks on a new programme of work.
If all UK metadata was made openly accessible, the taskforce says, then the resources themselves would be more visible and it would be easier to build innovative new ways for researchers, teachers and students to explore the resources.
Twelve national organisations have signed up to a new set of open metadata principles and now JISC is inviting all publicly funded organisations including universities, colleges, libraries, museums and archives to make the same commitment.
Signing up means that organisations are committed to supporting the principles and looking for opportunities to carry them out in whatever they do – whether this is building new ways to present unique collections or in contributing to national shared services for managing collections.
Rachel Bruce, innovation director of the digital infrastructure at JISC, said: “JISC advocates wide and easy access to resources for use in education and research. The new work programme called Discovery along with the open metadata principles underpin an approach that will help drive an innovative infrastructure and make sure that the UK’s future researchers and students can more effectively access and use content resources.”
The organisations that have already signed up are: British Library, BUFVC, Collections Trust, Digital Curation Centre, Edina, JISC, Mimas, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Owen Stephens Consultancy, RIN, RLUK, Royal Holloway University of London, SCONUL, The National Archives, UKOLN, University College London, and University of Southampton.
Read the Discovery Open Metadata Principles (aka “Call To Arms”)
Discovery Metadata Hashtag #ukdiscovery
See Also: The Metadata Ecology
See Also: One To Many; Many To One: the Resource Discovery Taskforce Vision (4 Page; PDF)
See Also: From Mark MacGillivray on the Open Knowledge Foundation Blog
In addition to the general open metadata principles promoted by JISC, we are promoting our Open Bibliographic metadata principles to provide clear explanations for what metadata can be considered open by default: http://openbiblio.net/principles/
Full details about the bibliographic metadata we have already made available are in our final project post.
About Gary Price
